Sometimes you look at the world and you just want to have a good cry. Other times you decide you have to do something.

Grass-roots goodwill efforts have been around ever since the Good Samaritan hauled a stranger out of the road, proving that upper body strength could be effective currency back in the day. Giving is satisfying. But grass-roots goodwill efforts don’t always scale.

For instance, imagine if three carpenters agreed to help an underprivileged family repair their rundown house. In reality, the family needs carpenter, a plumber and an electrician. The talents of two of the carpenters would be wasted.

Now imagine if Habitat for Humanity decides to help five families with new housing. Habitat can organize carpentry, electrical and plumbing resources, clustering the work by neighborhood and optimizing where and when repairs are done to ensure that talent is available. Efficient use of resources is proportional to the resulting benefits.

The EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is fast approaching but with significant resource investment required, many organisations are struggling to meet the May 2018 deadline. According to Google executives, moving data to the cloud will help take some of the pain out of upgrading security practices and data protection standards in line with the regulations.

GDPR is the biggest change to data protection regulations in two decades, and is a major challenge for many businesses. A survey from analyst firm Gartner released yesterday showed that around half of those affected by the legislation - whether in the EU or outside - will not be in full compliance when the regulations take effect.

Windows 10's latest preview, tagged as build 16188 and released Thursday, includes Windows Defender Application Guard, a virtualization-based feature that isolates the contents of a tab in Edge, the OS's default browser, from the rest of the system.

While Application Guard was announced in September, and went through limited testing in the months since, today marked its first appearance to all Insiders running Windows 10 Enterprise. Users must manually toggle on Application Guard from a setting dialog, then open a tab within Edge by selecting "New Application Guard Window" from the browser's menu.

China already has the world's fastest supercomputer and has now built a crude quantum computer that could outpace today's PCs and servers.

Quantum computers have already been built by companies like IBM and D-Wave, but Chinese researchers have taken a different approach. They are introducing quantum computing using multiple photons, which could provide a superior way to calculate compared to today's computers.

The Chinese quantum computing architecture allows for five-photon sampling and entanglement. It's an improvement over previous experiments involving single-photon sourcing, up to 24,000 times faster, the researchers claimed.

Blockchain technology is hard to ignore as practically everybody’s talking about it. That’s understandable because it’s predicted to disrupt the value flows that underpin business transactions and economies as well as create new business models. It has enormous power to solve business problems. But is a blockchain “distributed ledger” secure?

Blockchain is still in its infancy, so company leaders are naturally concerned about whether it can be manipulated. Organizations worldwide are seeking to take advantage of the new opportunities and disruptive power of blockchain — organizations that understand the magnitude of potential security issues. It has been rigorously tested in pilots and at scale by many governments, institutions and companies that have found the technology is incredibly secure.

Blockchain technology is hard to ignore as practically everybody’s talking about it. That’s understandable because it’s predicted to disrupt the value flows that underpin business transactions and economies as well as create new business models. It has enormous power to solve business problems. But is a blockchain “distributed ledger” secure?

Blockchain is still in its infancy, so company leaders are naturally concerned about whether it can be manipulated. Organizations worldwide are seeking to take advantage of the new opportunities and disruptive power of blockchain — organizations that understand the magnitude of potential security issues. It has been rigorously tested in pilots and at scale by many governments, institutions and companies that have found the technology is incredibly secure.

When Microsoft made it possible for enterprises to quickly resolve incompatibilities between their applications and new Windows versions, it didn't intend to help malware authors as well. Yet, this feature is now abused by cybercriminals for stealthy and persistent malware infections.

The Windows Application Compatibility Infrastructure allows companies and application developers to create patches, known as shims. These consist of libraries that sit between applications and the OS and rewrite API calls and other attributes so that those programs can run well on newer versions of Windows.

Shims are temporary fixes that can make older programs work even if Microsoft changes how Windows does certain things under the hood. They can be deployed to computers through Group Policy and are loaded when the target applications start.

Following a $3.7 billion acquisition, AppDynamics is already looking to access Cisco's enterprise customer network as it plans to keep up the pace with the big hitters in the new wave of enterprise software vendors.

Cisco completed the acquisition of AppDynamics in March this year for a reported $3.7 billion (£2.86 billion), nearly double its pre-IPO unicorn valuation of $1.9 billion (£1.47 billion).

Speaking at the AppD Summit in London recently, CEO David Wadhwani said that the primary reason for the acquisition from Cisco's side was its belief in the underlying streaming data model that had been built at AppDynamics, not just in how it could help Cisco, but in its ability to further penetrate the enterprise market.